t.Loft Health Café owner Jill Minton is a bit of a renaissance woman. The entrepreneur/speaker/podcaster/health-food maven now owns five of her popular fast-casual cafés sprinkled throughout the metro. Started in 2013, t.Loft is now a multi-million dollar brand. If you’ve met her, you know how passionate she is about the all-natural, healthy foods she whips up. We, on the other hand, asked Minton to come up with five of the most random things people don’t know about her. “This was fun!!” she said. We agree.
1) My dad was a wheat farmer in my early life. Turns out we—myself and family members, including my dad—have an autoimmune disease that prevents us from eating wheat. We had no idea! I can’t even tell you how many harvests I spent in the wheat fields. I ended up building a business around avoiding wheat.
2) I’m a closet technology geek. Oh, and I love spreadsheets. I moved to New York to intern with IBM in college to feed my inner technology obsession.
3) My graduating class had 36 people—in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas. I moved to L.A. after college. I will never forget the first time pulling into Los Angeles—a constant traffic jam of eight lanes of traffic each way. I worked in one of the high rises downtown and you could see it on all the movies when they panned the skyline of L.A. It was big time!
4) My life plan was to be an Olympic gymnast. At 4’9” and 85 lbs. as a freshman in high school, I was pretty sure I was engineered for it. Too bad my tiny town didn’t offer gymnastics classes.
5) I once climbed an ice glacier in Switzerland. There was an avalanche on the mountain while we were up there. It was amazing!